So it should now be obviously quite clear that some authors are
buying their way onto the bestseller lists. Book sales are the main
component, but Amazon is now employing other factors such as book
reviews. Todd Rutherford ran
a website called GettingBookReviews.com that reviewed books for $99.99 a
pop or arranged 20 reviews for $499 or 50 reviews for $999. He would
post them on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other booke websites to help
authors get noticed. It certainly helped indie darling John Locke, who
ordered 300 reviews and went on to sell over one million ebooks on
Amazon. Before this website was shut down, it was generating $28,000 a
month from authors looking for a competitive advantage.
So how many books do you need to sell to get on Amazon’s bestseller
list? Normally you need to get between 500 and 1,000 sales of your book
within the first few days following its release to make it to the top
100. If you’re really ambitious and your aim is to hit the Top 5, you’re
going to have to be a lot more aggressive in getting higher sales
numbers. It seems that a title in Amazon’s top five averages 1,094 print
copies sold across all channels, including other retailers, on a
typical day. Amazon controls close to 70% of the US eBook market and 30%
of selling physical books.

But for the sake of provocation, Mr Dubner seems to have low-balled
this. He should know the power of lifetime earnings and compound
interest. First, instead of $30,000, assume a university graduate, who
in America is likelier to use a foreign language than someone without
university. The average starting salary is almost $45,000.
Imagine that our graduate saves her “language bonus”. Compound interest
is the most powerful force in the universe (a statement dubiously attributed to Einstein,
but nonetheless worth committing to memory). Assuming just a 1% real
salary increase per year and a 2% average real return over 40 years, a
2% language bonus turns into an extra $67,000 (at 2014 value) in your
retirement account. Not bad for a few years of “où est la plume de ma tante?”

This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He wrote a paper
on March 12, 1989 proposing an “information management” system that
became the conceptual and architectural structure for the Web. He
eventually released the code for his system — for free — to the world
on Christmas Day in 1990. It became a milestone in easing the way for
ordinary people to access documents and interact over the Internet — a
system that linked computers and that had been around for years.
The Web became a major layer of the Internet. Indeed, for many, it
became synonymous with the Internet, even though that is not technically
the case. Its birthday offers an occasion to revisit the ways it has
made the Internet a part of Americans’ social lives.
Our first report
tied to the anniversary looked at the present and the past of the
Internet, marking its strikingly fast adoption and assessing its impact
on American users’ lives. This report is part of an effort by the Pew
Research Center’s Internet Project in association with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center
to look at the future of the Internet, the Web, and other digital
activities. This is the first of eight reports based on a canvassing of
hundreds of experts about the future of such things as privacy,
cybersecurity, the “Internet of things,” and net neutrality. In this
case we asked experts to make their own predictions about the state of
digital life by the year 2025. We will also explore some of the economic
change driven by the spectacular progress that made digital tools
faster and cheaper. And we will report on whether Americans feel the
explosion of digital information coursing through their lives has helped
them be better informed and make better decisions.

For digital content, the buy vs. borrow equation shifts back a bit. In
principal, there's no shipping cost and modern databases can retrieve a
digital item in milliseconds. But if a library can do digital ILL, what
is to prevent libraries from sharing a resource so widely that only one
library in the world needs to buy the item?

So when people say they want a Netflix for books, which of
these 3 services are they talking about? It’s my distinct impression
that most people confuse Netflix #1 with Netflix #2, and they forget
about the lag time for the DVDs. They want a comprehensive and fully
up-to-date library for a low monthly price. This will hot happen for
movies and video and it will not happen for books.

This does not mean that there will not be book
aggregations. There already are. What it means is that aggregations are
simply another distribution channel for content and have to be analyzed
like any other. If an aggregation is comprehensive, it will cannibalize
sales from other channels. Hence no aggregation can be comprehensive. If
the aggregation releases titles too quickly, even if the aggregation is
less than comprehensive, it could interfere with other channels, which
interferes with the media strategy known as “windowing,” which releases properties along a planned-out timeline the better to maximize returns. An
aggregation, in other words, is a limited collection of books placed on
the market precisely when the value of those titles is not greater in
other channels.

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Michael Cairns

I enjoy discussing the publishing industry and in particular the changes that impact the business. On PND, I don't write about everything, just the things that interest me.

My career spans a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and my operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer.

I have served as a board member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and in addition to my responsibilities at R.R. Bowker, l also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.